Saturday 26th January

Saturday 26^th January

Australia Day!

We are going to a beautiful wedding, Nichola and Gus , in Salamanca.  I am wearing a bright pink and blue dress (Zoe would LOVE it; she tries very hard to summons enthusiasm when she sees me in my black and grey work numbers…) and Pete is going to stun the crowds with a costume of his own devising.  I will keep you posted!

MONAFOMA cont’d

We had a bit of a break, which involved lying on the 2XS couches in a slumped position, and then set off to see David Burn (from Talking Heads) and St Vincent (aka Annie Clark), once again in Prices Wharf Shed.  We were a bit fortified by a beautiful meal, cooked by Pete, and involving vegetables from his very own garden, freshly picked/dug/gathered.  The band was fabulous; I have googled a description:

Live, the brass section shared the spotlight with the singers, and the 12 performers spent nearly two hours engaged in odd but charming choreography that included a conga line and recalled Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks.

I needed to google this because…I couldn’t see anything at all… Occasionally, through the crowd, I caught a glimpse of an enormous gleaming tuba.  And several times brave Pete hoicked me up so I could see over people’s heads.   It was great fun, to see a large brass section, all choreographed, line dancing!

Last night I removed my Thursday blogbit about MONAFOMA.  I discovered, to my great dismay, that I had offended some people.  This was never my intention; maybe I was just being too clever by half.  I didn’t mean to be unkind or hypercritical; in fact I rather thought that what I had written revealed more of my own deficiencies as an appreciator of the arts than anything else but…apparently not so much.  And maybe I shouldn’t have written about Pete’s reaction because in fact Pete enjoyed the performance greatly, although this sort of modern classical music is a bit bewildering to him.  He is quite happy (happier, alas, than I am,) to stretch his boundaries.  So…I have removed the “review” and send my apologies out into cyberspace…

India

Apart from wanting us to meet John Stark, Raj was insistent that we visit Chokkidani before we left Jaipur.  He extolled its many charms and virtues, and said we would be totally enchanted.  Slightly reluctantly, we let him drive us the 25 kilometres out of Jaipur to Chokkidani.  It is a cultural theme park, very much geared towards Indian families.  And yes we did have a lovely time, although we got very lost wandering around and around, seeing what looked like the same little elevated platforms with Rajastani women dancing with pots on their heads.  “Oh look we must be getting closer to the restaurant, see there is the elephant!”  But there was ofcourse more than one elephant, and many more than one dancing troupe of pot-headed women. 

         

We never told Raj that what we liked best of all was the ferris wheels… He would have thought we weren’t appreciating the culture of the cultural theme park.  We actually found the magicians and musicians and dancers just a tad repetitious and boring.  But the ferris wheels; well we sat enchanted indeed and watched them for long periods of time.  One was small, with only two lots of seats.  It was made of wood and was very rickety.  Two big strong men spun and whirled it without – miracle – breaking off their arms, which could so easily have become jammed in the struts.  The other one was made of metal, and had about eight seats.  At first we thought it was powered by some sort of motor, but no!  It was powered by an athletic young boy, no more than fifteen years old, who jumped up and swung on the seats to get momentum.  Once he had got the whole thing started he climbed up through the mechanism then pedalled the whole contraption like a giant treadmill.  It got up quite a lot of speed.   He never once lost his footing.  I suppose ferris wheel boys who lose their footing are never seen again at Chokkidani; they more than likely are dead and buried!  When it came time to slow the wheel down, he would jump into the seats to weigh them down and get the momentum to change.  Just fascinating.

         

Food was included in our entry fee, but we decided to go through to the adjoining glitzy resort and have a more substantial meal, with gin and tonic and Kingfisher beer.  (We didn’t tell Raj this either, he would have been disappointed that we weren’t sitting eating dhal off banana leaves.)  This turned out to be a very good idea, the resort itself was just fascinating.  It catered almost exclusively, I should think, for wealthy Indian families.  The families in the theme park part of Chokkidani were more your average Indian battlers, and consequently the children were all charming, happy, polite.  Through in the glitzy resort they were monsters!  There were packs of twelve year olds roaming around with poor frazzled resort workers trying to entertain them while their parents had childfree time.  They were so rude and disrespectful to the staff, we were amazed.  They were also quite plump and petulant; until then we had only seen slender, cheery children.  The resort itself was all lit up, fairy lights everywhere, little cabins shaped like the Taj Mahal, a huge mosaic tiled pool, water features everywhere.  Glitzy to the last degree!